Type something to see the thing you're actually looking for

When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth

Illustration by Rich Jacobs

When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth

What matters is that when you lift the avocado to your mouth
you bend all your senses toward it, yet
allow a sliver of its flavor to escape
your lips—not into the muffled ether
of radio static that deadens the air
around us, but into the nearly real lips
of those who have gone before us, the pale
blue shadow-forms of the ancestors
who no longer have bodies to touch or to taste with,
to sing or to fuck with, but who still recall
what it is to touch or taste or sing or fuck
and who long for it and, in their longing, attach
themselves to the living, incarnated ones,
in the hope of feeling, once more, by a process
that must be mostly imagination, some spark
of sensation, the thinnest, outermost layer
of the experience of hearing the ocean,
of watching the moon rise over a city,
of kissing a woman, of stroking the fur
of a cat as it stretches to meet your palm,
of holding a pen, of smelling the pine-scented
breezes at dusk, of gazing deep into
a fire, a well, the eyes of a lover,
of tasting a teardrop, of tasting avocado.

contributor

TJ

contributor

Troy Jollimore is the author of three books of poetry and three books of philosophy, as well as numerous articles, essays, and reviews. His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for 2006. His third, Syllabus of Errors, appeared on the New York Times' list of the best books of poetry published in 2015. His poems have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, McSweeney’s, the New England Review, Subtropics, and Tin House. In 2013 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry.